Tolstoy goes digital: Writer’s collected works available in one click

Tolstoy's dream has virtually come true: All of his texts are now available to everyone. Source: Sergei Prokudin-Gorsky

Any one of 90 volumes containing 761 works by the great Russian writer Leo Tolstoy can now be downloaded free on the internet as part of the ‘All Tolstoy in a Click’ project. However, for now the texts are available only in Russian.

The
collected works of Russian author Leo Tolstoy, including novels, stories and
large quantities of letters and diaries and notebooks penned by the writer, are
now available to all free of charge on the internet as part of the "All
Tolstoy in One Click" project.

In
the course of the last year and a half, volunteers of the project have
transferred 90 volumes of the works of Tolstoy into digital format. Now the tolstoy.ru website
is offering free downloads of the author’s works, both as these volumes and as
separate works - a total of 761 e-books.

"This
project is a way to approach today's youth, which reads everything on the
screen," said Fekla Tolstaya, one of the author’s descendents, at a press
conference. Tolstaya is serving as director and mentor of the project, whose
organizers are the L.N.Tolstoy State Museum, the Yasnaya Polyana
Museum-Estate and the Russian software developer ABBYY.

The
most significant part of these digital collected works, according to Tolstaya,
is Tolstoy's diaries, notebooks and letters, which earlier were available only
as part of the 90-volume series and not published anywhere else. For now,
however, the texts are available only in Russian. Perhaps in the future the
texts will be translated into English.

Tolstoy's
dream has virtually come true: All of his texts are now available to everyone.
The author declined his copyright: The collected works even open with the
sentence "Reproduction is permitted free of charge."

It
is still not clear whether the project will be realized in other languages as
well. Even though Tolstoy himself declined copyright, he made no mention of
copyright for translation of the works. But according to Fekla Tolstaya, the
organizers are willing to negotiate with translators and republish the
collection at least in English. Tolstoy's works have still not been translated
in their entirety in one single language.

The
publication of the original 90-volume collection was initially timed to
coincide with the 100th anniversary of the author's birthday, with the volumes
published gradually over the course of 30 years (1928-1958). Many people
subscribed to receive the books, unsure whether they would live to see the
publication of the last volume. Now it is practically impossible to buy the
printed collection in its entirety and even in libraries you are only likely to
find part of it.

The
history of the issue

ABBYY
prepared the digital version of the pages, putting the scanned material through
an optical character recognition program. Afterwards it was placed on the
internet on the readingtolstoy.ru
site, with an invitation to users to read the Tolstoy volumes and
simultaneously correct the imperfections of the automated recognition software.

People
of various ages and professions accepted the challenge: from managers to
housewives, from 259 Russian cities and 49 countries. The first phase of
reading took only two weeks: In this period more than 1,000 volunteers read
46,820 pages of text. It was calculated that the volunteers’ overall reading
speed was 8.5 volumes or 3,344 pages a day.

The
text was read several times. For the second reading the volunteers were
selected, as well as for the third, which involved professional editors. A
total of 3,249 people participated in the project.

Some
of them purposefully aimed at setting a record: For example, one Alexander
Aksyonov read 6,081 pages. "Many volunteers just wanted to be the first to
read the diaries and letters that had been inaccessible earlier," says
Yury Koryukin, CEO
of ABBYY Russia.

The
readingtolstoy.ru
site now offers those who have registered the option of using an interactive
map to see who is reading Tolstoy all over the world. You can also add a
favorite quote to the collection or find another one using special tags and
share it on social networks.

Big
data from a big novel

While
preparing the text for the internet, specialists from the Higher School of
Economics in Moscow noticed that it is now possible to study the linguistic
composition of Tolstoy's works with the use of a search engine. For example, it
was discovered that the longest sentence from War and Peace contains 229 words and is
located in the novel's third volume in the third part.

Using
the same method, the wardrobes of the protagonists can be analyzed: For
example, the author mentions 120 different dresses in the course of the novel.
You can see that in the second "peace" volume there were no overcoats
or boots, which were abundant in the "military" fourth volume. It
also turned out that, as was expected, Pierre Bezukhov eats more than anyone
else, and that, unexpectedly, Natasha Rostova is the one who speaks the most,
while fatty Pierre is one of the biggest listeners.

These
are not serious studies; this is all for fun. But the toolkit that will be used
in the future is clear. "Before no one dared to approach such a voluminous
work - the creation of a Tolstoy dictionary - but now it will be
possible," says Culture Advisor to the Russian President Vladimir Tolstoy,
another one of the author’s descendants. "We are still unaware of the
depth of everything that has been done and is being done."